In state of the art systems it is known to use images of different types and from different modalities for different medical tasks, like post-processing or diagnostic tasks. If a physician needs to access images from different modalities up to now it was necessary to manually combine the data sets. However, in order to manually combine two studies, the physician needs to have specific knowledge with respect to data retrieval. For example he needs to know unique identifiers for accessing the data. It is therefore comprehensible that this known procedure is error prone and may—as a consequence—also lead to severe failures with respect to diagnosis, for example because the manual combination of studies relate to different patients.
Particularly in the field of hybrid imaging, which might be based on a PET modality and a CT modality there do not exist any proposals to automatically associate studies of different types in electronic form.